The Beech of Ter Pelkwijkpark

Two official bodies have dated this beech and they are fifty years apart. The national register of monumental trees puts the planting between 1880 and 1890. Zwolle's own 2024 list of special trees, describing the same species in the same park under the same municipal ownership and the same monumental status, says 1930. Neither is a guess by us and neither gets dismissed here. Both are the work of people who went and looked, decades apart, and the honest answer is that this tree is somewhere between about 95 and 145 years old. The gap changes what it lived through. On the register's dating it was already a substantial tree when German troops entered Zwolle in May 1940. On the municipality's it was a ten year old sapling that grew up through the occupation and the Canadian liberation of the city in April 1945. What is not in dispute is that it is the odd one out. Ter Pelkwijkpark is an oak park: more than a dozen pedunculate oaks carry register entries here, a dense municipal stand of one species. This beech is the only one of its kind among them, which makes it the easiest tree in the park to find and the hardest to date. If anyone has a girth measurement, it would settle the argument.